Lenovo T61 laptop does not see external USB HD

[jmattson]

Hello,
I have a Lenovo T61 laptop and I connected a BlacX Sata docking station via USB, and plug in an External Sata HD 2.5 disk and it does not show in My Computer nor does it show in Disk Management. It does show in Device Manager/Disk Drives and shows USB Mass Storage Device in the USB category. No errors are indicated. What can I do to make this work?

 

[sminlal]

Is this a brand new drive? If so, it may need to be partitioned and formatted - without that the drive will not be assigned a drive letter and it won't show up in Windows Explorer.

WARNING - the following steps will erase all data that was previously stored on the drive:

Click "Start" --> right-click "Computer" and select "Manage".

Click "Disk Management" in the left pane.

Scroll down to the BOTTOM of the MIDDLE pane.

You should see your new disk there with a label such as "Disk 1" or "Disk 2", etc. Right-click on the label in order to create a new volume (which partitions the drive) and then again to format it.

Once it's formatted Windows will assign the next available drive letter to it and then it will appear in Windows Explorer.